Automation tails from the fox hole

DSC

This post is part of the Learning DSC Series here on FoxDeploy.com. To see the other articles, click the banner above!

For years now, people have been asking for a DSC GUI tool. Most prominently me, I’ve been asking for it for a longggg time!

My main problem with DSC today is that there is no tooling out there to help me easily click through creating my DSC Configurations, other than a text editor. For a while there, I was hoping that one of the tools like Chef or Puppet would provide the UX I wanted, to click my way through making a DSC Configuration for my machines…but after checking them out, I didn’t find anything to do what I wanted.

My view differs slightly from my peers in that my background is in Enterprise Client Management, and I’ve been deploying SCCM since 2011 for customers into the tens of thousands of desktops and servers.

However, I also love to code, so maybe my perspective will help the concepts gel for you.

In my mind, this debate is not really about which tool is the one-true king to use in all cases, but rather about highlighting the strengths of each and noting when they should be used. I’ll also describe how you deploy operating systems using each product as well.

It’s all about the evolution of tooling

First the Earth cooled, then we got GPO

For all practical purposes, the first true large scale management tool we had for Windows systems in the modern era was Group Policy, or GPO as it is commonly truncated. This stemmed from Local Security Policy, which is a fancy GUI to control system settings via special registry keys which are locked down from general user editing. Local Security Policy could be shared among systems in a Workgroup which was a big improvement from setting the same configuration on each system.Continue reading →

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This post is part of the Learning PowerShell DSC Series, here on FoxDeploy. Click the banner to return to the series jump page!

Hey guys, I haven’t forgotten about you, but it’s been a very busy month here, with me traveling to Redmond ( Microsoft HQ! I have to post a pic!) for some exciting Microsoft meetings and then back and forth to Minneapolis for a new client!

I didn’t know what to do with my hands in this picture.

I’ve been receiving your messages and have now released the final step in this one-click Domain controller DSC Build. To recap, we left off with a DSC Config that would make our machine a domain controller, but that was it. Continue reading →